


dendrochronology

by lonelyghosts



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (neither in explicit detail), Child Sexual Abuse, Depression, F/F, Happy Ending, Sister-Sister Relationship, Suicide Attempt, Trans Aradia Megido, Trans Damara Megido, Trauma Recovery, also the revenge cycle, minor references to jade/aradia/sollux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23502196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: Your name is Aradia Megido, and you love your sister, even when it's hard.
Relationships: Aradia Megido & Damara Megido, Porrim Maryam/Damara Megido
Comments: 10
Kudos: 33
Collections: Ladystuck Art/Fic Exchange 2020





	dendrochronology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TransSatya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TransSatya/gifts).



> "i also learned the word dendrochronology—analyzing the patterns of tree rings to know everything that has ever happened to a tree. this is how i love you. i am peeling back my skin, layer by layer, so you will finally know everything inside me.” (roxanne gay, strange omens)
> 
> my prompt for ladystuck was for thekashif (on tumblr) and i had four prompt possibilities: damara/porrim with damara learning how to trust people again, megido humanstuck family, preferably with an aradia who cares a lot about her sad and angry older sister, trans vriskan, and trans damara. i chose to combine prompts 1, 2, and 4! i hope you enjoy <3

Your name is Aradia Megido, and you love your sister, even when it’s hard.

When you were kids, you thought Damara was the best, most talented girl on Earth. She could do no wrong. She played with you and helped with your homework, and listened to you rant about your neighbor and kind of friend Vriska Serket being a bitch to you. When you told her at the age of six that you weren’t a boy, you were a girl, she hugged you close to her and whispered that she was too. The two of you went to HRT appointments together, and she gave you tips and did your makeup and both of you went thrift shopping together; she lent you her old skirts when she grew out of them. 

Damara was the best sister on Earth, and you were the luckiest girl, too, to have her as a sister. 

You started to realize that Damara was far from a perfect sister or person when you entered middle school.

There had always been bad days, days where she wouldn’t speak, where she flinched away from touch, but it got really bad the year that you entered seventh grade. She stopped talking about what was going on at school, she stopped hugging you, she stopped touching you at all. All your information about how her senior year was going came from the rumors about her- which you took with a hefty grain of salt, considering that you normally heard the rumors in question from Vriska, who had her own reasons to lie about the truth. 

When you heard that Rufioh and Damara had broken up- from Vriska, then from Terezi, then from Kanaya when you didn’t believe the two of them- you went home and asked Damara about it.

All you wanted to do was provide comfort, the way she did, when you had fights with Sollux about how little he took care of himself, or with Terezi about her deep, somewhat codependant friendship with Vriska, or with Vriska about how much of a bitch Vriska could be. She was your sister, and you wanted her to know that no matter what, you were always there for her.

The words she yelled at you, hurled and spit and sneered under a curled lip, they hurt. She said things you’d heard before- from teachers that didn’t understand that the way you learned was different, from Vriska whenever you tried to ask about the bruises that showed up on her skin- but from Damara, your sister, it cut deeper than anything ever had. You cried yourself to sleep that night, woke up clutching the small cloth doll she’d made for you back when you were in first grade and had trouble sleeping without your nightlight. It was tearstained.

The next morning she apologized, but there was a gap between the two of you after that. You loved her, but it hurt to look at her sometimes and know that she’d said things that you had always told yourself weren’t true. You didn’t talk to her as much anymore.

You regret that, now. 

You didn’t know, back then, what was happening. You were only a child. You didn’t know that the man who lived next door to you was hurting Damara in ways no one should ever have hurt a child, the same way he was hurting Vriska and Kanaya’s friend Rose. You didn’t know that she wanted to protect you from his gaze. You didn’t know that she was so scared he would hurt you too, because she was going to graduate that year, and she wouldn’t be able to protect you anymore.

Your eighth grade year went to shit with alacrity, but not because of Doc Scratch. You don’t think Damara knew that he already had a new victim, and it wasn’t you- it was a girl who was already vulnerable and who broke in the most public and disastrous of ways.

Vriska pushed Tavros down a staircase and paralyzed him from the waist down. You didn’t know why and you still don’t really know why she did it- maybe Tavros saw things you didn’t and confronted her about them. Maybe she couldn’t stand him anymore. Maybe she didn’t know the reason herself. It didn’t matter. Tavros will never walk again.

You were a child with dreams of vengeance. You barely remember what you did to retaliate against her anymore- you think you spread rumors about her, bad ones. You know that she found you outside school and beat you badly. You know that Terezi put a pipe bomb in Vriska’s mailbox and Vriska lost an eye and an arm for it, and that Vriska slashed Terezi’s tires and the resulting car accident lost Terezi her eyesight. It was the fracturing of your friendgroup and it put you in therapy for a long time.

It is more than understandable that you didn’t notice. Your world was falling apart from the inside, you barely had enough energy to care for yourself, to rebuild. You could not have noticed Damara slowly falling apart.

Your mother and your family and your friends and Damara herself have told you these things, but it doesn’t matter. You still blame yourself for it. You think you always will. 

Damara tried to kill herself on the last day of her freshman year of college. Your exams were all done, and so were hers. She didn’t leave a note, or a message, or anything- she went into the shower and did not expect to come back out. 

Her roommate Latula came home earlier than usual and heard the water running. It’s probably the thing that saved her life. 

You had just come home from the last day of school; you were sitting on your kitchen counter with Sollux, feeling alive again and not wanting to lose that moment, eating popcorn and laughing about bad movies. Your mom was out on a nursing shift. You were the one who picked up the phone when it rang.

Sollux says you didn’t scream, or cry, just stood there frozen in the hall with the landline pressed up to your ear. You remember the slow sinking loss that struck you in the chest like a blow, the voice in your ear hazy and indistinct, the cold that sunk into your skin and wrapped its fingers around your shoulders as you heard _hospital_ , heard _self inflicted_ , heard _attempt_ , heard _stable for now but it could go either way-_

You dropped the phone and it broke on the tile. You didn’t try and clean it up, just stared at the yellow wallpaper that Damara picked out years ago and thought about your sister, alone, in the middle of a hospital miles away, with no one there for her- 

Vriska lived two doors down from you and she knew how to drive, even though she was technically too young for it. You ran down the street with Sollux at your side, Sollux who hadn’t needed to hear a word from your mouth to follow you. You nearly broke down her front door knocking.

She was snarling when she answered, her shitty makeshift eyepatch covering the scar tissue of her ruined eye, but you only needed to get through a few sentences before she took a deep breath and grabbed the car keys from the mantle piled high with her mother’s junk behind her and pushed past you to where the shitty Jeep sat in her driveway. It made a guttering sound when she started it and you stared at her as she cranked down the window, still snarling at you.

“Well? Come on!”

She didn’t need to say it twice. You were in the passenger seat before she could take another breath, Sollux clambering in the backseat on your heels. You sputtered out the address and she nodded, pulled out of the driveway and started driving.

You think that moment was probably what began the process of mending your relationship with her- she knew Damara, had maybe heard Scratch mention her, and wanted to make sure that she was okay, and that was all the two of you needed at that point.

Damara looked so small in that hospital bed, bandaged and breath rattling in her lungs as the monitors beeped with the sounds of her heart. You held her hand for hours; Vriska paced and made comments in the background, Sollux called your mom to tell her what had happened, but you sat next to Damara and whispered things that you hoped might help her, and you held her hand the whole time. 

The truth of it came out over the next few days. What Scratch was doing. The clinical depression and trauma that had come out of it. You wept and blamed yourself and still, as Damara- hurting and angry and ashamed, too-small in her hospital bed surrounded by white sheets- heard your words, she laid her hand on yours.

“It's not your fault,” she rasped, and you cried harder.

There were many things that happened afterwards. At first, Damara didn’t want to press charges, swore she’d do anything to never have to face Scratch again- “it was just me, I never want to look at him again, _please_ , Mama-“ to which your mother cried and begged and said she’d kill him herself if he was allowed to get away with what he’d done to her daughter. 

Vriska, who kept driving you and never accepted gas money, walked in on one of these arguments and went white. Later, you saw her slip into the room as you and your mother left for lunch, the argument left unsolved. When you came back, Vriska had tearmarks on her face and Damara did too. They had both been crying. 

“I want to press charges,” Damara said. 

She started going to therapy- not with you, but with a counselor that your own therapist knew, who dealt with special cases; people with sexual assault related trauma. Damara didn’t _like_ going to therapy- she came out with wet cheeks more often than not- but it helped her, and that was all that mattered.

You didn’t see the trial- Damara didn’t want you there, said it would break her heart if you went. You heard about it, though- heard about Damara on the stand, her spine straight despite the way she’d shivered at the thought of facing him the night before, talking about all the things he’d done to her and not flinching from it, shedding tears for the girl she had been and mourning her. You heard about the younger victims, who didn’t testify on the stand but who had given statements beforehand. You heard about the judge, giving a sentence that made Damara collapse in a puddle of relief. 

The two of you went out to a tapas place that night to celebrate. You still remember the way Damara froze and flushed when she saw the waitress- a girl covered in tattoos under the sleeves of her uniform, the long black waves of her hair tied up in a bun. She introduced herself as Porrim and smiled, kind, as Damara stuttered over her own name and you looked between the two of them, grinning. 

Porrim left her number and a winky face on the check. Damara spluttered and spilled water all down herself when she saw it, and you couldn’t help but giggle. 

“You should call her,” you said, tapping your fingernail against the swooping curl of Porrim’s handwriting. “She's pretty and she likes you. And… Damara, I want you to be happy.” 

She stared down at the number. You don’t know what she was thinking of- but she pulled out her phone and typed something in a few minutes later, so you know that in the end, it must have convinced her.

After that you found the two of them texting quite a bit; Damara smiling more and more often as she looked fondly down at her phone,fingers flying across the screen as she stifled giggles and held back her laughter. 

The first time that Damara laughed, after everything, it was because of some stupid meme that Porrim had sent her. The sound of it sent bells chiming in your heart, singing, and you would hold on to that song for the rest of your life. 

They started dating four months later- an excessively long time, you felt, but when you told Damara she raised her eyebrows and reminded you that you’d had a crush on your classmate Jade for a long, long time, and on Sollux for even longer, and you weren’t really doing much of anything about that, so you really had no room to talk. Which, you supposed, you didn’t. 

Damara started slipping out the door every few weeks to go slide in the passenger’s seat of Porrim’s shitty beat-up green Volkswagen Beetle for their date. You always watched them get into the car- holding hands right up until the point that they had to let go to get into the car itself, holding on to each other for as long as they possibly could. 

You think everyone else expected it to end eventually, at least once Damara felt that she was capable of returning to college, but it didn’t. Porrim went to a college whose campus neighbored Damara’s, and you remember Skyping her every week and hearing Porrim humming along to one of her heavy metal songs in the background, a comforting presence that was always right next to Damara, a steady beat and rhythm that you started to associate with Damara herself. 

You wish you could say there was one moment that made you realize that Damara and Porrim were in love with each other, but there wasn’t- it was a series of them, gradually building over time. Damara skidding into the front room when you yelled that her girlfriend was here, and the way her face lit up with light. Porrim defending Damara against an asshole who kept harassing her and blushing when Damara kissed her cheek and said _My hero._ Damara coming home from a date with a soft, far away look on her face that you’d never seen before. Going over to visit Damara’s campus as a surprise on her birthday and finding Damara sleeping in Porrim’s lap as Porrim ran her fingers through Damara’s hair, a look of unbearable fondness on her face.

It was the little things, that stacked on top of each other one by one until you looked at Damara and Porrim and knew that you wanted your partner to look at you like that if you ever got married someday. 

You know that no matter what, Damara will always have some lingering ghost around her because of what happened to her. But with Porrim, Damara breathes easier, smiles more often, laughs in a way that you couldn’t remember her doing before Porrim. There’s no greater gift that Porrim could ever have given to your family. 

Your name is Aradia Megido, and you love your sister. And you love Damara even more.


End file.
